Griffith Review 63: Writing the Country

Ashley Hay, Julianne Schultz

The environmental vocabulary of our times requires dramatic terms: extinctions and endings; tipping points, cascade effects and collapses. In recent years the relationship between people and their environment has shifted from one of innocence to one of anxiety. In the second issue of Griffith Review, published fifteen years ago, Melissa Lucashenko wrote of 'earthspeaking, talking about this place, my home'. All these years later, the need to hear all sorts of earthspeak has perhaps never been more urgent. Issue 63 focuses on Australia’s vast raft of environments to investigate how these places are changing and what they might become; what is flourishing and what is at risk.